Title

Authors

Publication Date

April 2017

Advisor(s)

Demetrius Eudell, Peter Rutland

Major

College of Letters, History

Language

English (United States)

Abstract

On December 15, 2006, the U.S. Army published the field manual (FM), FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency. Downloaded over two million times in the first two months of its release, the manual offered an attractive solution to the U.S. military’s inability to quell the sectarian violence in Iraq. This thesis adds to the on-going criticism of the manual’s use of Vietnam War revisionism, by suggesting that the writers used a counterfactual lens to justify their version of population-centric counterinsurgency doctrine.